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Tangible Play’s Osmo is something special. It feels new and exciting the first time you play around with it, and you’re pretty much sold as soon as you experience it.

This iPad accessory and gaming platform for kids is dead-simple to use, but a bit harder to explain. The best way to think of it is an analog Kinect for your iPad, but one that uses a simpler design and is made exclusively for playing with physical pieces, like solving puzzles with blocks or for playing word games with physical letter tiles. Osmo’s first games are built purely for kids, but it’s easy to see how the platform could inspire a new wave of games for anyone.

First, you clip a plastic mirror reflector onto the iPad’s front-facing camera, which flips the camera’s field of view 90 degrees downward. From there, you can use real-world objects—word tiles, puzzle pieces, hand-drawn sketches, and practically anything else—as game pieces in Osmo’s three free apps. That little mirror clip, combined with superb optical recognition and AI capabilities, turns the table top in front of the iPad—an area a little larger than a piece of paper—into a digital game board.

The first games include Words, a hangman-style game where two players can compete against one another by placing word tiles in front of the iPad to fill in the blanks. Tangram is a game that lets you use Osmo’s set of colored shapes to match onscreen puzzles, with the iPad letting you know when you’ve achieved the correct placement. Newton, a physics game, requires no special game packs; you can use a pen and paper—or any object placed in front of the iPad—to create mazes that guide an onscreen ball to its target.

These are all very simple games that would probably be mega-boring if they didn’t have the added dimension. But the interplay between the physical world and Osmo’s apps makes them fun and fascinating. In Words, you quickly find out how amazing the system’s optical-recognition capabilities are: You push a pile of word tiles in front of the iPad, and the system immediately recognizes all of them. It can handle dozens of tiles at once. In Tangram, the system’s spatial intelligence capabilities shine, as it recognizes whether a puzzle assembly is correct no matter which way it’s facing. And there’s a eureka moment while playing Newton where you realize you don’t need to draw more lines; you can simply reposition the piece of paper they’re drawn on or use your hand as part of the maze.

At first, these wow-factor features draw attention to the platform itself, but Osmo fades into the background once that initial sense of awe wears off. It quickly feels natural. A big reason for this is because the games are designed to be social, so you’re playing with your friends and interacting with each other instead of the device. The iPad just serves as a digital referee for whatever game is playing out in front of it. Essentially, that makes Osmo’s games more like board games or electromechanical games than videogames. Casual mobile games like Words With Friends make it possible to lose a game to a friend halfway around the world in real time, but your experience still involves staring at a smartphone or tablet screen. If you were actually hanging out together, you’d probably play the physical version of Scrabble, and when you’re huddled around an actual game board, the game itself is secondary. It’s more about the smack-talking, the laughter, and sharing an experience.

Most importantly, Osmo is fun. The version I played during my demo was a finalized product, and it’s definitely ready for retail shelves. But Tangible Play has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise the money needed to mass-produce the first games. A presale bid of $50 gets you all of Osmo’s first-gen hardware: the camera reflector and base unit, the Tangram puzzle pieces, and the Words tiles. That’s a deal—all of those bits are slated to cost $100 as a package when Osmo becomes widely available by the end of summer.

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